Visiting Professor to Offer Short Course on Resistance and Hegemony in Mexican Politics

Share this page:

February 5, 2014

Spring 2014 Short Course (Feb. 12 – March 2)

This short course, offered by visiting professor Ricardo Macip, focuses on the major tenets and effects of a radical transformation in Mexico. Started as a response to a financial crisis, what has been identified broadly as a “neoliberal” project effectively changed the productive forces and property structure of the post-revolutionary state. Even if some resistance was expected, it could not anticipate the forms it would take or its depth. Taking 1994 as the entry point, as it marked NAFTA’s inauguration and the Zapatista uprising, the course will follow three Mexican politico-administrative periods (known as sexenios) in their confrontations with a broad and plural civil society to the present. Even though the changes are impressive, such as the overthrow in competitive elections of a State party after seventy years of rule, they do not obey to any blueprint neither to a shared democratic desire by all social groups as has been stated. Rather, it is in the friction between political and civil societies to which we ought to look in order to ask better questions and learn how resistance and hegemony shape each other on a daily basis with periodic eruptions.

Visiting instructor Dr. Ricardo F. Macip is a research professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades “Alfonso Vélez Pliego” of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México). Anthropologist by training (Universidad de las Americas-Puebla 1993, New School for Social Research 1998 and 2002), he is dedicated to the study of the history of the subaltern classes in the Eastern Provinces of Mexico (Puebla, Oaxaca and Veracruz). Dr. Macip is the author of Semos un país de peones (2005) and editor of Sujetos neoliberales en México (2009), Al que a buen árbol se arrima, buena sombra le cobija (2012) and coeditor (with Natatxa Carreras) of Perversión Y duplicidad (2010) all under the seal of the ICSyH‐BUAP. The results of his research projects have been published as articles in professional journals in English and Spanish.